In the Beauty of the Lilies (35 page)

She saw Patrick at least once a week and took his advice except when it was about men. If he had had his way, she would never have gone out, except with guys he hankered for himself. At his suggestion she enrolled for acting and elocution lessons at a school—a dusty maze of bare-floored studios on Fifty-seventh Street—which had been rendered old-fashioned by the rise of the Method. Rather than focusing on inner emotional states, they still taught technique, which Patrick thought she needed. The voice instructor, an old Englishman who sipped martinis from a glass tube concealed in a silver-headed cane, winced when he heard her dragged-out, twangy Delaware vowels and had her wear a clothespin on her nose to force her voice deeper into her throat. To improve her posture, she was made to lie flat on the floor until
the instructress, once a Thirties chorine, could see no air beneath her spine. There were lessons in fencing and stage duelling, in mime and in falling downstairs. When certain
grandes dames
of the stage came as guest lecturers, the girls were expected to wear hats and white gloves. The theory seemed to be that, if sufficient attention were paid to the outside, the inside would take care of itself. The shell of illusion needed behind it only a certain poise, a stillness, for the audience to feel engaged; it was better, in fact, not to reach out too boldly, but to allow the audience, like any object of seduction, the space in which to come forward and exercise its own volition. If God were too eager to please, who would worship Him?

Between lectures and lessons Essie rushed to photographers’ studios. She was not gaunt enough for high-fashion assignments, but the manufacturers of floor waxers and insecticides, toothpastes and skin creams liked her solid hometown looks, her even teeth and guileless smile and dark strong Moorish eyebrows and elusive glow. Her long straight legs, those of a tomboy a few years ago, were used to illustrate the new seamless stockings, with their “nude” look. Posed with an electric fan, she appeared aristocratically cool; with an electric heater, invitingly warmed. She paid for her lessons and shelter and yet had enough left for increasingly generous presents, on birthdays and anniversaries, for her parents and Ama and Grandfather Sifford. Steuben-glass bowls, imported English gardening tools, new-fashioned electric kitchen appliances, a pair of antique hornshell curved combs for Ama’s wonderful crown of hair. And she received presents—an emerald bracelet from the Iranian playboy, a silver cigarette case with a rueful inscription from one of her married friends. But she never, unlike some of her fellow aspirant actresses and
part-time models, let herself be listed by any escort service, or accepted a cash present for her nights away from the Barbizon. Her lovers in this period, who in later and less reticent decades yielded up to interviewers a considerable number of candid details, agreed that Essie was striking in her energetic directness, her earthy innocence, her at times childlike gaiety, as well as in the unforgettable beauty of her naked body: the fullish breasts and slender thighs, the wrists and throat to whose pulse her fragile young life was bound, the thickly dark-fleeced
mons veneris
and the Artemislike virgin strength.

The big Hollywood movies at the end of the Forties were
Easter Parade
and
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Rope
and
Johnny Belinda, Red River
and
On the Town, Adam’s Rib
and
Samson and Delilah
. Attendance was down from the peak of 1946, but only industry insiders noticed, or grasped the significance of the anti-monopolistic legal rulings which would separate the great studios from their theatre chains. In New York Essie discovered foreign films—from England,
The Red Shoes
and Olivier’s
Hamlet
and
Kind Hearts and Coronets
, with Alec Guinness hilariously playing eight murdered characters. From France,
La Chartreuse de Parme
with subtitles and Gérard Philipe, and
Les Enfants Terribles
and
Le Silence de la Mer;
Essie had never seen on the screen such disillusion, such despair, such blunt black Godlessness, not even in
The Ox-Bow Incident
. The films back at the Roxie had wounded only to heal, to dismiss their consumers back into reality as even better Americans and firmer Christians. Essie was shaken and stretched above all by the Italians and
neorealismo—
the movie about the drunken soldier who picks up a whore and keeps talking to her about the pure and simple girl he once knew without realizing it was she, this very whore; and the one about the man whose bicycle is stolen and who looks
for it all over Rome with a little boy: the poverty, the squalor, the vitality, the honesty so fierce that
The Miracle
and
Bitter Rice
had to be seen in a little showing room below Fourteenth Street beyond the notice or the reach of the Legion of Decency. Patrick took her to those, and to the chaste little pair of theatres in the Museum of Modern Art, where she entered for the first time the twitchy, stark, absurd, majestic world of the silents—it was like entering the silence before she had been born, when Ama had no gray hair and her grandfather Wilmot walked the earth. He had read too many books and escaped into the movies: these were two facts about him that reverberated in the family, calling out to her. Also, the museum showed the Russians—the glowering robed giants of Eisenstein, stalking one another through castle corridors like chambers of a vast crazed mind. For the first time, in a scene of charging Teutonic Knights, faceless in their tin-can helmets, she saw the Christian cross, flapping on their banners, used as a symbol of evil. These many films new to her unsealed an abyss that Essie had not looked into since she was seven and, sitting between her parents, had watched
Lost Horizon;
in that pretty young face suddenly crumbling with age had loomed an abysmal cruelty of horizonless time and space from which Hollywood and her house on Locust Street and her customarily answered prayers had sheltered her. But to remain loyal to her prayers it was necessary to face this harsh illumination and grow, though it hurt, and often the date on whose arm she walked out through the lobby did not, from his crass comments, seem to have absorbed anything, to have any idea of what a troubling revelation he had witnessed.

Patrick always knew what to say about the movie, where it went hollow and where it rang true, what bit of business suddenly
fell into the rhythm of real life and made you laugh. That was a thing about homosexuals: they were sensitive. And yet they were frustrating, not just sexually; some inner deflection kept him on the sidelines of life, studying paintings but not wanting to paint himself and even sneering at those that did try, falling in love with boys at NYU who were straight, and disdaining as “queers” and “fags” those who were like himself. He had discovered at boarding school that he could neither change nor enjoy his nature; when Essie, for whom sex had never been a problem—an entertaining smooth chute into the dark-red bliss of things—offered to prove to him that he could love girls, he said, “There you go, dropping that damn towel again.”

“Didn’t you feel anything when I did that? A little tiny throb? Even of c-c-curiosity, what it would be like?” She knew how to coax a man, from seeing so many movies, but none that she could remember had ever touched on this peculiar problem, of what she pictured as short-circuited wiring.

“I felt protective,” he said, “and still do. You’re my dear little cousin, for Chrissake.” She made him feel masculine, perhaps, as he guided her education and at an uncontaminated distance oversaw her career; he made her feel effective, and reckless, and whole. He had several times mentioned a desire to get her out of the “rag trade”—increasingly the modelling agency had sent her out on assignments of modelling shortie nighties and provocative negligees and push-up bras. The ads appeared in the back pages of men’s magazines like
Esquire
where it was not likely Ama or Momma or Daddy would ever see them, but in fact bratty Danny had discovered one and showed it to everybody in Basingstoke. Patrick scolded her: “Wexler is using your very charming innate exhibitionism
and turning you into his house tart. Next thing you’ll be posing naked for calendars.”

Essie shrugged; shame was not part of her religion. “What’s to hide? I mean, it’s me.”

“You do sell yourself short, darling, sometimes. It’s one of the disadvantages of coming from the sticks; you don’t know your price in real dollars. Now, try to think, what do you
really
want?”

“A house and a husband and ch-children?”

“Piffle. Oh, my, such piffle. You want a house and children and a collie dog about as much as I do. What you want is to be in the movies. Right? You want to
act
. You need a theatrical agent. I’ve been asking around, and I think I’ve found a fellow for you. He works for an outfit called the Music Corporation of America, but don’t you worry, they’ve gone beyond music. I did a dance on the telephone and we’ve got an appointment for you at Radio City.”

“Oh Patrick,” she said, squeezing his arm through the thick black sleeve of his chesterfield. “I wish I c-could do
some
thing for
you
.”

The agency was on the sixteenth floor, beyond and above the skating rink, the golden sideways-floating deity, the enormous Christmas tree and its great red balls, the revolving doors, the green-marbled lobby floor marked out with squares of concentric strips of brass, the brown murals of nudes with knotty bottoms laboring and men in Mexican hats being set free and giant obscure machines and cogwheels rolling forward in some kind of revolution, the banks of whispering elevators with pleated brassy doors and Negro operators in white gloves and braided uniforms. Essie was nervous, because as they whiningly ascended she could feel tall suave Patrick’s tension beside her, but as soon as they were ushered
into the agent’s office she relaxed; the agent was like Uncle Peter, except shorter and Jewish. He gave her that same sense of jumpiness, of being up on the balls of his feet, and of wanting to touch her. His name was Arnold Fineman. What he had of hair was frizzy and reddish. Essie felt certain she would eventually sleep with him and went very quiet and proper, sitting in a chair with her knees pressed together and her gloved hands clasped on her black alligator pocketbook. She was so reticent that Patrick took over at first, describing her modelling and her acting and elocution lessons, and how she had been in summer stock last summer, in Bucks County.

“Yeah? Whadjou play?”

Essie spoke up: “I was the maid in that play by Thornton Wilder,
The Skin of Our Teeth
. Sabina.”

“Howja do?”

“She was wonderful,” Patrick loyally said. “And then she was Florence McCricket, in
The Torchbearers
.”

“The audience seemed to like me,” Essie admitted. “You work so hard and feel every night you’re getting better, but then in a week it’s over. The director said I needed to strengthen my voice.”

“In those hay barns, sure,” said Arnold Fineman. “They’d muffle Ethel Merman. When else you been on the stage?”

“H-high-school plays,” Essie faltered. “I was always the mother. And I was s-s-second runner-up in the Miss Delaware Peach contest in 1947, when I was seventeen.”

Her stammering perked him up, roused his protective instinct a little. “How old’re you now?”

“Nineteen. Twenty this coming February.”

“Not getting any younger, huh?” He reached across his cluttered desk to a pack of filtered Viceroys and with a tricky snap of his wrist made a couple of the cigarettes jump out an
inch, offering them across the desk before lighting his own. As he squinted through the smoke he looked like Aunt Esther, and too serious about his work to be sexy like Uncle Peter. She doubted now that she would be sleeping with him. He asked, “So you think you want to be in pictures?”

“I guess so.” She amended that to, “More than anything.”

He sighed. “Would you do anything to get there?”

She supposed she should say yes, but hesitated, trying to imagine what anything might be, and he rescued her with, “Move around for me. Walk around the room like you’ve come into a bar in Shanghai. Whoops, the Commies have Shanghai now. Make that Singapore.”

Essie had put on a soft gray wool coat dress, ankle-length, rather
chinoise
, with a high collar and black buttons and a strip of black braid down the front, and a gray felt pillbox on the back of her head. She sauntered around in the tight imaginary skin of a shady woman, Dietrich or Ida Lupino, parting the curtain of beads with a hand and knee and cruising the bar, heavy-lidded, through the pall of Oriental smoke. Peter Lorre was there, and Sydney Greenstreet, and maybe, at the bar, in a white dinner jacket, smoking a cigarette and nursing an old grief …

“O.K., O
.K.
,” Arnie Fineman said, in this high office where the Venetian blinds turned the sun into stripes and there were signed pictures of stars on the walls just as in her bedroom. “Now pucker.”

“P-pucker?”

“Make a mouth at me. What the frogs call a
moue
. Pout. Think kiss, Esther. Think melting point. You’re creaming in your pants.”

She put her hands on her thighs and bent her body into an S to bring her face down to Arnold Fineman’s level, blushing
and feeling humiliated that Patrick had to watch this. She feared that such a display would put him further off heterosexuality. But then with a little push of inspiration from behind she got into it, shuddering her eyelids at half-mast and thinking directly into Fineman’s face,
You little kike shit, some day you’ll pay for this
.

Fineman gingerly smiled. She saw he had a motherly, worried side. He was not only short but so stooped in the shoulders he looked hunchbacked. “O.K., Esther—good try. Great try. You could use more upper lip. Maybe you can do it with lipstick. And the hair—we gotta take it in some direction or other. Your boyfriend here says you sing. Give me a song.”

“With no piano?”

“I’ll hum along. Only don’t make it ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ Jesus.” The song saturated the air this plangent December; it was hard to chase the tune from her mind. “Mule Train” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky”—one of the girls at the Barbizon could do a very funny Frankie Laine, with a hair-dryer as a microphone. “ ‘Some enchanted evening,’ ” Fineman began in a surprisingly rich baritone, “ ‘you vill see a straaanger.…’ ”